Joel: “Oh no, no, no! Oh, my heavens, no! No! Oh God! Oh Porgy! Oh my dear heavens, no, no, no, no, no, no, no….”

Crow:Well, y’think that’s enough to convey the raw terror she must feel as a giant bowl of “California Cornucopia Vegetable Jubilee” slithers towards her on all fours, it’s hellish maw…[1]

That’s how I felt today reading David Atkins article, Where Did the Republican Political Acumen Go? Look, I admire Atkins; he’s a keen political observer but, “Oh, my heavens, no!”

He started by discussing what a great political machine the Republicans had in the early days of the Bush Jr administration. I agree with that. But Republicans generally have good operations when they control the White House. The Republican Party is an authoritarian group. When they have power, their army falls in line. It is only when they don’t have power that they fall to pieces.

But Atkins really lost me when he wrote, “Conservatives had forced or persuaded a Democratic president to declare the era of big government at an end, to smash welfare, to deregulate Wall Street and pass free trade agreements one after the other.” Really?! That’s not my memory of the 1990s. I’ll admit, this is a time of special focus for me since I’m working on a book that focuses on the New Democrats and their abandonment of liberalism. But still, I remember the 1992 campaign and how conservative Clinton was. I especially remember him promising to “end welfare as we have come to know it.”

So it isn’t the brilliant Republican political machine that pushed Clinton and later Obama to the right. What I would call the center right is where these men feel most comfortable. Another thing I remember from the 1990s is just how crazy the Republicans were. They are marginally worse now, but they were still crazy. Remember how Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons? Even Ken Starr investigated it! This was mainstream stuff. The Republicans didn’t get Clinton to bend to their will; it was the other way around. Imagine what Clinton might have accomplished if he had been a real liberal!

What the Republican political operation shows is that political operations don’t mean that much. Even with a hopeless eight years, they still managed to get the White House back. (They also came close to doing it democratically!) And after all this madness, they may well get it back in 2016. They don’t need to be smart or reasonable or even disciplined. All they need is a good economic slowdown or crisis. That’s how politics works in the United States. Remember, as brilliant as Karl Rove may have been, Bush still lost the 2000 election. This is despite the fact that the unemployment rate had stopped falling and was beginning to rise. Bush should have won that election fairly easily and didn’t.

I think that David Atkins is falling for a myth. The Republicans’ lack of success in governing is not a choice. They really aren’t good at it. If they had been, they would have managed to create their conservative economic utopia in Iraq. Instead, they made a mess of it. All they’ve really been good at is continuing to exist during the dark 1960s and 1990s. Just like bad managers, if political parties stay around long enough, they will be rewarded with power. I understand the desire to look back on it and provide a narrative. But there has never been a brilliant Republican Party in my lifetime. Time in grade.

None of this should be taken as a reason for Democrats to feel safe. Quite the contrary. It means that regardless of how good a job we do, Republicans will soon be back in power. This is why the New Democrats bug me so much. Their idea was that by moving to the right, they could win elections. But just as with the Republicans, the Democrats’ time had come in 1992 and 2008. By electing a conservative Democrat in 1992, the party allowed the political landscape brought in by Carter and Reagan to ossify. Bush Jr came in and pushed things further to the right. Obama is now allowing that new normal to ossify. The problem we face is not the brilliance of the Republicans, it is the cluelessness (or simple conservatism) of the Democrats.

[1] That’s from Crow T Robot’s great screenplay, Earth Vs. Soup. Watch; enjoy; learn:

Last week, Joshua Green wrote, Obama’s Top Economic Adviser Tells Democrats They’ll Have to Swallow Entitlement Cuts. He went to a Q&A session with Gene Sperling and concluded that the administration is trying to soften up the liberal base for a deal that offers entitlement cuts in exchange for Sequester cuts—no new revenue at all. There are a couple of things wrong with this.

The big thing wrong with this is that I don’t know any liberals who are actually in favor of the Grand Bargain. Maybe at one time, it wasn’t such a bad idea. But now the deal has been reduced to limiting loopholes in exchange for decreasing entitlement spending. We all know that the loopholes will quickly come back while the entitlement cuts will go on and on. So regardless of what proponents say, it is a short term tax increase in exchange for long term spending cuts. That’s a bad deal for liberals!

Now Green is pushing the idea that the White House is going to take long term entitlement cuts for nothing—or maybe a couple of years of Sequester cuts. Even I don’t think that the administration is that clueless. Instead, what seems to be happening is that Green is reading the tea leaves wrongly. I don’t know much about him, but I assume that he’s a typical upper middle class Washington reporter who really wishes to see entitlement cuts. You know what they say: wish in one hand…

But my reason for even talking about this is a comment that Green quoted from White House spokesman Amy Brundage in response to Sperling’s comment, “Gene was reiterating what our position has been all along: that any big budget deal is going to have to include significant revenues if Republicans insist on entitlement reforms.” I really hate the euphemisms. And even more, I hate how they favor the conservative reading of what’s going on.

The word “revenues” is not really wrong. But it has been used so often as a euphemism for “taxes” that I think people get the wrong idea. Again: these would simply be the elimination of loopholes, not new taxes. This is then contrasted with “entitlement reform,” which is the biggest euphemism this side of “collateral damage.” No one is talking about reform. We are talking cuts—pure and simple.

What we ought to be asking is this, “Are you willing to exchange the rich having their taxes go up by a very small amount for a couple of years in exchange for having your Social Security cut each year of your retirement?” In fact, as bad as that “deal” sounds, it is even worse. Chained-CPI would also throw more and more lower and middle class people in higher tax brackets going forward. So many people of modest means would see their taxes go up. What a brilliant idea that would be. Conservatives would clearly love it, but I don’t see what is there for liberals at all.

What Joshua Green is offering up is even worse than this. But like most Washington reporters, I doubt he’s thought much about it. In the group he runs with, there are all kinds of things people know that just ain’t so. And that’s the basis of “objective” reporting!

I learned from The Young Turks this evening that the Los Angeles Times will no longer be publishing letters from climate change deniers. My already high opinion of that paper just went up even further. Let me explain this from my perspective. My PhD is more or less in global warming. That is what all the physics and chemistry that we did went to understanding. So even though I no longer do the work, I understand it really well. What’s more, when I did work in the field, I was highly skeptical. I tend to be a believer in the Gaia hypothesis and it seemed very strange to me that the earth’s climate system could be so easily disrupted.

But that’s a whole different kind of skeptic than we find today. For one thing, the science wasn’t nearly as nailed down 20 years ago. We were looking for additions to the science, not holes in it. In particular, we were looking for negative feedback loops. Today, even the most serious skeptics are little more than charlatans. Those who even pretend to be doing science cherry pick data to make their cases. In other words, they aren’t doing anything like science. Science does not work this way: get an idea; ignore all data that contradicts idea; idea is right!

The problem is so much worse with lay people. They constantly mention things I’ve never even heard. “Oh, such and such, has proven that ice core temperature records are wrong!” Oh really? And how exactly is that? Well, they never know. It’s just the latest thing they’ve heard on Fox News or hate oriented radio (HOR). So it requires me to go actually look for whatever they are talking about. In the vast majority of cases it is from The Heartland Institute. Now that in itself is interesting. As late as 1994, Heartland was pushing the idea that secondhand smoke had no negative health consequences. Today, they are one of the biggest purveyors of quack climate science. Just like with cigarettes, there will never be any convincing them because they don’t do science. They are in the propaganda profession. Eventually, they will drop global warming denial just like they eventually dropped the cigarette-cancer link denial.

But regardless where the “research” comes from, most of the time it doesn’t even say what I’ve been told. A great example of this is tree ring temperature records. There was a lot of commotion about the fact that two independent records didn’t match where they overlapped. Tree rings are not a great source of temperature records. You don’t get absolute temperatures; you just get relative temperatures. So it isn’t surprising that two different investigators would have an offset between their data. Does this mean the data are useless? Not at all. It just means the two sets have to be reconciled and then they work just fine if you want to look at temperature trends. What scientists studying global warming want to do is look at temperature trends. Regardless, when there is an actual data set it is either (1) an outlier of many different sets that show something else entirely or (2) misinterpreted by the “scientist” (most likely willfully misinterpreted).

So the Los Angeles Times is right to refuse to print letters from these lay people. It isn’t just that they are wrong. None of these people think about this stuff. If a Los Angeles Times reader is writing in, all they will be doing is repeating something they heard Rush Limbaugh say the day before. It has been many years since people on that side of this issue have seriously thought about it. Anyway, if you want to read climate change denial, you can just buy the Washington Post and read George Will.

Afterword

Here is The Young Turks segment:

Mark Czerniec is a total dick! A year and a half ago he totally ripped off the article I was going to write today, The Price of Gas When Obama Took Office: $1.81. You see, as I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge this morning, I saw the bumper sticker above. I hate this kind of thing. It isn’t just conservatives, but clearly it is mostly conservatives. And I hate seeing it from liberals even more than I hate seeing it from conservatives, but luckily, that’s fairly rare. This bumper sticker is conservative, of course, as you can see from the “no Obama” graphic.

What I most hate about this kind of stuff is that it shows such complete ignorance of economics. Oil is a global commodity. So the first thing I did when I got home was look up time series for gas prices in the United States and other countries. And guess what? They were identical! What’s more, if you look at the time series, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. And that brings us to Mark Czerniec who provided this great graph:

Back in January of 2012, Czerniec explained the problem as bluntly as one can:

But this gets to what is really depressing about politics in this country. Does anyone really think that Obama has managed the country so badly that gas prices have spiked? The only way that could really be the case is if somehow he managed to lower the value of the dollar. And for 99% of the country that would be a Very Good Thing! But I don’t think anyone really believes this. I think it is just a clever way of saying, “Obama’s a Booger Eater!”

I’m fine with that. If people just don’t like Obama, so be it. But they should admit it and not try to make the case that he has been such a disaster for the country. In the tradition of Fuck America: Vote Republican, I offer the following truthful bumper sticker:

You all know what I think of David Frum: he’s an idiot. And people just love him! He’s that most beloved of figures in the mainstream media: a “reasonable” Republican. And what did he do to get that? Oh, a few things here and there. He isn’t a ranter; that’s probably the most important thing. But he’s also for minor forms of gun control. And after decades of being against same sex marriage he came out for it two years ago. But he’s still against legalizing cannabis. He wrote, “If somebody could prove to me that marijuana was harmless or that legalization would not lead to an increase in marijuana use, I’d change my mind about marijuana legalization.” So when no reasonable person anywhere can argue a point, Frum is right there to sign up. He’s a special kind of follower: always last.

When it comes to economic and international policies, Frum is as bad as they get. So I’m not inclined to think that he’s reasonable. Now if same sex marriage was the most important issue in the world to me, I might think differently—even though Frum came to the party pretty late. Ditto for gun control. And other than that, what exactly does he offer? He doesn’t question President Obama’s birth certificate? Whatever.

Today at The Daily Beast, Frum wrote a very strange column, How Ted Cruz Can Win in 2016. After reading it, I doubt that most people will have any idea if it is supposed to be ominous or encouraging. He really doesn’t tip his hand. But if you look at other things he’s written, a pattern emerges. First there was, Why Does Ted Cruz Inspire Such Animosity? Then there was, Can Ted Cruz Win by Losing? Frum doesn’t lay it on thick, but he clearly likes Cruz and would appreciate working for him in the White House. (Alright, I’m speculating about that, but even I’d rather work for Cruz than Bush Jr.)

The actual winning plan is pathetic. Basically, the Democratic Party gets split between Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. There is an economic crisis. Cruz picks Chris Christie as his running mate, and they squeak into office.[1] What makes this really pathetic is that the only thing that matters in the story is the economic crisis. If things take a major turn for the worse, whatever Republican runs for president in 2016 will probably win. That’s just political science fundamentals. We all know that if everyone is out of work, they will throw out the party in power. That will mean that the party that is most responsible for the bad economy will be rewarded. That sucks, but that’s America.

So this is what the prototypical “reasonable” Republican uses his very big platform for: dreaming about a world in which food is denied the poor, healthcare is denied the sick, and war with Iran is imminent. It also shows you just how important gun control and same-sex marriage is to him: Cruz is very much against both. I suspect that Frum would say the same thing I do, “Those issues are not as important as economic and foreign policy issues.” The problem is that making the economy and international relations worse is what Frum is willing to trade these issues for.

[1] He doesn’t mention the rest of the sad story. On inauguration day, Christie has a heart attack and falls on Cruz. Neither survives. Nancy Pelosi becomes president.